Bill Boyd

I am British and Russia is my enemy.

“ Alyn Smith ‘Insults’ AI Objectors …… by comparing those who object to AI centres to those who would have dismissed the lightbulb as a ‘dangerous anti-candle device’, and apparently rejects the Environmental Impact Assessment (EAI) which has concluded that the site proposed for a mega-AI centre in Larbert would have a ‘major adverse’ effect on operational and construction greenhouse has emissions’ as well as dismissing fears of significant health implications for local residents and loss of amenity. It’s okay though. Smith tried to calm their fears by saying that the Scottish government was ‘establishing an observatory to track AI’s impact on jobs and how the technology is being used’. Perhaps they should have modelled the possible results before plunging headlong into a Scotland covered in Data Centres? He thinks it will be sunshine all the way. But Dr Kat Jones of Action to Protect Rural Scotland is doubtful about the economic benefits, saying AI centres bring few jobs. She echoes that a proper in-depth assessment should be carried out, prior to which there should be a pause on AI datacentres. Sounds like anything for money “ isp.scot/october-31st-novemb…

Robin McAlpine, apparently against his better judgment, finds himself describing the lives of Scots in colonial terms - resource extraction, economic backwardness, population loss and the lost cultural confidence he acknowledges, but exhorts Scots to pluck out of thin air. Independence - and he is not joking, he tells us - has to made about parking places. Robin's contempt for the past - what brought us to the dismal downtrodden, underdeveloped point he readily identifies - is what traps him, and keeps him thrashing aound for a gimmick to galvanize Scots into taking their affairs into their own hands; a parking place, a pothole repair. An 'independence thermometer', even. Professor Baird explains that we need to understand our condition in order to escape it. Postcolonial theory tells us this, just as any psychologist would. It is essential we put a name to it, and that name is colonialism. Doing so demands answers: where did it come from, what was its purpose, does it explains who and what we are? Here, with the asking of these questions, is Robin's sought-after confidence - the secret sauce he identifies as the producer of independence votes. Withouth understanding this, that confidence, and the votes with it, will continue to elude us. Keen to highlight the difference between the nations of the world that have escaped British colonialism and a Scotland still in its grip, here it is in essence: those nations understood their colonial condition, unobscured by adjacence, shared white skin and an imperialism holding out the offer of a subaltern role in its international ambition. So, what about the United Nations, where Robin says Liberation Scotland is wasting its time? Will international opinion on Scotland as a candidate for recovery of usurped sovereignty have no bearing on the cultural confidence of our people? Will the UK government dismiss peer state judgment pointing to a problem of fundamental constitutional legitimacy? Might it not make a democratic event on Scotland's recovery of sovereignty a slam-dunk for a welcome back into the family of nation states? When it happens, will Scots still be weighing it up against the difficulty of finding a parking space? Robin's immersion in policy and party political strategy may be obscuring a far bigger picture altogether than the simplistic one he is presenting: the overarching picture of a nation recovering from a long colonial past. Liberation Scotland would welcome Robin's further reflection on this conversation. We would welcome all of Scotland's. youtu.be/9n9WgfDKuEM?is=eaFP…